Marion wrote down the address of the vacation park, then asked: ‘Is it urgent? I wasn’t due at the house till Friday but could stop by tomorrow if you want.’
‘Oh please … that would be amazing.’ Suddenly Kitty wondered whether Karren had taken advantage of her absence to move in with Tom. Did she ever spend the night there, in her bed? Would Marion tell her if that was the case? Did she want to know?
‘Are you OK?’ Marion asked.
Kitty paused, then decided to leave it. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
The suitcase arrived at the vacation park two days later and Kitty couldn’t wait to get back to the cabin and examine the contents. Marion had wrapped so much tape around it that she needed to cut it open with a Stanley knife. Inside there was a mixture of photograph albums, framed portraits and loose snaps, all muddled together. No care had been taken as to the order, everything shoved in higgledy-piggledy with the decades mixed up, so Kitty began by sorting them into piles according to age and which side of the family they came from.
Once she had them in rough order, she focused on the oldest, sepia-coloured prints from her mother’s birth family. Someone had helpfully scribbled names in pencil on the backs of some: ‘Rosa, Nicholas and Marta, Coney Island, 1937’ – that was three years after they arrived in America. There was an amusement park in the background and they looked like any family on a fun day out. She imagined the photo must have been taken by Dmitri. Another showed the children peering out from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, looking slightly older. Kitty tried to remember her grandmother’s date of birth and reckoned it must have been around 1925 or 1926. Marta looked maybe thirteen or fourteen in the picture, with skinny legs, straight brown hair held in place by an Alice band, and teeth too big for her face. Nicholas was taller, his hair cut short, wearing long trousers and an open-necked shirt.
Marta seemed more popular than Nicholas; in these childhood pictures she was usually surrounded by groups of friends, and as she got older there were boyfriends – dozens of them, it seemed. Her grandmother hadn’t been a great beauty but she was always smiling or laughing in her pictures, and she dressed with great style. Even as an old lady, Kitty remembered her wearing tailored trouser suits that made her look years younger than her age, often accompanied by a man’s trilby hat.
Many pictures showed dark-haired Rosa with friends, smiling in the garden of a weatherboard house or sitting on the sofa with a dog by her side. Kitty had to search long and hard before she found one of Rosa with a man who looked as though he might be her husband, an arm around her waist. He was very handsome, with slicked-back hair and a white-toothed smile, like a matinee idol. Was this Dmitri? He was tall and well dressed, his posture erect. She found one more shot of the same man, this time standing in his garden, leaning on a hoe, with the same straight, almost military posture, although his hair was unruly from the effort of toil. She felt sure this was her great-grandfather and strained to make out details of his face: a high forehead, brows like a shelf beneath which dark eyes stared out, sharp cheekbones, full lips. A face that looked as though it had been carved from hardwood. Did he have a melancholy air or was she projecting? She thought she could see a family resemblance with her and her mother, perhaps in the shape of the face, the chin.
Why were there not more photographs of him? The answer came to her that in those days men were the ones wielding the camera. Even two generations later, her father had been the family photographer, quipping that her mother always cut off the tops of heads.
Amongst the photos there were postcards from holidays in Switzerland, Cornwall, Santa Barbara and Vancouver Island, with a variety of signatures, the ink old and faded. There were letters from people who appeared to be family friends, telling news of children and grandchildren, illnesses suffered and house moves. Kitty didn’t recognise any of the names.
At the bottom of the suitcase she found a battered, ancient-looking notebook with black leather covers. Inside, every page was covered top to bottom in handwriting in what she assumed were Russian characters. Straight away she guessed it must be Dmitri’s. Perhaps they were notes for his novels. The writing was small and incredibly neat but she could not make head nor tail of it. Why keep this notebook but not more of the many notes and manuscripts he must have produced during his writing career? He must have had a reason, and Kitty decided she was going to find out. If only she had known her great-grandfather; somehow she felt they would have had a lot in common. Maybe this notebook would help her get closer to understanding him.
Kitty drove to the vacation park coffeehouse for the second time that day and opened her laptop to search for Russian to English translators. There was one called Vera Quigley in the town of Gloversville, about seventy miles away. She called and made an appointment to drop by the following afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Gloversville, New York State, 1st September 2016
Vera Quigley lived in a tiny two-storey house with a door that opened directly from the street. Inside it was like a dolls’ house, with bookshelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling and furniture crammed in so tightly there was barely space to squeeze between. She appeared to be in her sixties and she was short – under five feet, Kitty reckoned – with a cap of very soft, fine baby hair that looked as though it might recently have regrown following chemotherapy. Vera waved Kitty to an armchair and as she sat, she could feel the springs through the fabric.
‘Are you Russian-born?’ Kitty asked, glancing round at a set of matryoshka dolls laid out on a shelf in height order.
‘No, my parents came here in 1917, but I was brought up bilingual. I used to work in the Slavonic Languages Department at Yale but moved here when I retired and now I do a bit of translation on the side … Can I offer you some lemonade?’
A jug stood ready on a side table and Kitty was happy to accept because it was a hot day and her mouth was dry.
‘This is the notebook I told you about.’ She passed it over. ‘I think it may have belonged to my great-grandfather, who was a novelist.’
Vera took the notebook, put on a pair of reading glasses and opened the first page. ‘This is a diary,’ she said straight away. ‘These short lines’ – she held it out to show Kitty – ‘are dates. Do you see? That one reads March fifteenth, Wednesday.’
‘Which year?’
Vera looked at the front cover of the notebook. ‘I can’t see a year. Would you like me to translate a little so we can discover what it is about?’
‘Oh, yes, please!’
Vera opened it to the first page and spoke slowly: ‘February eighteenth, Sunday. We had obednitza at 11.30.’ She glanced up to see if Kitty had understood – ‘That’s a liturgy in the Russian Orthodox Church’ – before continuing. ‘Then we worked outside in the garden, digging over the soil. A letter from the outside world made me laugh with M’s description of his landlady’s cabbage soup tasting as if she had boiled up some dirty stockings from her laundry bag. He writes that he is teaching tricks to a foul-smelling mongrel with traces of so many breeds that it is impossible to guess its parentage. The dog is a fast learner who will wait in a corner for several minutes until given a signal, upon which it will retrieve a ball and drop it in his lap in return for a crust of bread. It would put to shame certain other dogs of our acquaintance!’
Vera stopped and looked up to see if this made sense to Kitty.
‘I wonder why he talks about a “letter from the outside world”. Where was he?’
Vera shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Shall I carry on?’
‘Why not try a later passage?’
Vera flicked to the middle of the book and chose a page: ‘30th April, Monday. Olga and I are learning to make bread, under the watchful eye of Trina.’